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Gaston, Lloyd

Sola Scriptura

by Lloyd Gaston

Presidential Address to the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies
(1987)

I always rather liked the slogan sola scriptura. It is a Reformation phrase I
learned from Karl Barth, and I have not really thought about it very much since. It serves
as a useful tag to express the conviction that Scripture ought to have authority not just in
but, over the church. I kept that conviction when I taught in a. department of Religious
Studies - a, very safe place in which to preserve one's theological illusions - but it
caused problems when I came to a theological school, where I thought that if Scripture has
authority over the church I should naturally have authority over colleagues who taught only
church history and church doctrine and church practice. Needless to say, I did not get away
with that! Clearly, I need to think about sola scriptura again.

The concept of canon, on the other hand, has never seemed very interesting The insistence
that the Word of God could be heard within the carefully defined boundaries of specific
documents and nowhere else appears to be a peculiarly Protestant obsession with no
historical and little theological justification. With respect to the New Testament, I rather
like the more common-sensical definition of C.F. Evans: ''These are writings which have
accompanied the Christian movement; they are the best, we have and they have proved
themselves."1 After all, what we work with as exegetes is
the extant literature of ancient Israel and the early Christian church. To be sure, there is
no immediate apparent reason why these two enterprises should be combined in one single
society, the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, but that is a sleeping dog we can safely
let lie. At least that was so until Brevard Childs made so much noise opening his can of
worms as to awaken all those sleeping dogs. With respect both to the principle of sola
scriptura and the disciplines of our Society, I believe that the concept of canonical
criticism holds out both a promise and a threat. The threat is I think best expressed in
Childs' latest book, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction, and I begin with that.2
It is a work which deserves to be taken seriously. Because the terms of the discussion are
set by Childs, this address will be more theological than perhaps is appropriate, it will
concentrate on problems of the New Testament canon, and it will initially continue to use
the terms "New Testament" and "Old Testament."

Childs' enterprise is either complex or confusing or more likely both. Not only is the
word "canon" used in three different senses to apply 1) to the final form of a
redacted writing, 2) to a corpus of writings seen as a authoritative unity, and 3) to the
principle of authority itself; but the adjective "canonical" is applied to so many
nouns as to be superfluous. Let me then try to summarize his thesis as best as I can,
without using the word "canonical". First, I think his major concern is with an
erosion of the authority of the New Testament in the church, a concern which I deeply share.
But it is not at all clear how his proposals will advance the cause at all. To insist on the
importance of redaction criticism is very salutary, although Childs insists that he means
more than this and it is hard to see how this would help the church, which in its worship
hears Scripture in pericopes and not in books. It is also quite problematic to insist that
parables, for example, be interpreted solely in their present literary settings, as he seems
to say in a murky excursus. When Childs says that one must try to understand how an ancient
text was "transmitted, shaped, and interpreted in order to render its message
accessible to successive generations of believers by whom and for whom it was treasured as
authoritative,"3 we can heartily concur if what he means is
history of interpretation of Wirkungsgeschichte, but the word "shaped"
appears to indicate that something more than that is meant.

The most problematic part of Childs' proposal lies in his appeal to the canon as an
authoritative collection of writings, whereby an absolute authority is given to the
collection as such, even at the expense of the individual writings contained in it. The
early church in collecting those writings has great problems with the "particularity of
the epistles"4 and the "plurality of the
gospels."5 Since Childs is a consequent thinker he sees the
same problems and proposes that the New Testament canon forces us to understand Paul as
bracketed between Acts and the Pastoral Epistles (in fact, how Paul was assimilated by the
ancient church) and that we "transcend" the four gospels in favour of a
"harmony of the gospels" (tried already by Tatian). Even in textual criticism the
guiding principle is to be not the recovery of the earliest possible text but rather of what
Childs calls the "canonical text," the text received by most of the later church.
For example, the secondary ending of Mark is taken as the authoritative text for harmonizing
the Resurrection appearance stories in all the other gospels. Childs consciously contrasts
the historical Paul and the canonical Paul,6 the Paul of the
letters and the Paul of the church,7 with authority lying only
with the latter. But that is to downplay the authority of Paul and the gospels in favour of
the authority of the church in the third to fifth centuries, by appealing to an idea of
canon which was not; even their primary authority. The overall effect of the canon appears
to be to shut the New Testament writers up in a cage of the church's making. It is curious
that Childs does not discuss a parallel and even more serious simultaneous development: the
taming of the Torah through the formation of a canon of the Christian Old Testament. The two
processes cannot be unrelated, for the end result is to subordinate the cage called Old
Testament to the cage called New Testament. Not only do the two cages not relate to one
another very well, but the valley between them tends to be grossly neglected when it goes
under the name of "Intertestamental." We have come far from our initial nostalgia
for sola scriptura, and it seems that it is the problem of the canon and the two
cages which first needs rethinking.

First, however, it might be helpful to survey some of the recent work done on the history
of the formation of the OT and NT canons. In the course of preparing this address I was
surprised at how I had to give up most of the received wisdom I had learned only 25 years
ago. One need only look at the two articles in the IDB (S) by Freedman and Sundberg
to see that the formation of the OT was much earlier and the formation of the NT much later
than the old consensus would have it. There are some historical conclusions we will all have
to come to terms with, even if Freedman and Sundberg do not yet represent a new consensus.

It might help to begin with some definitions. "Canon" is probably not an
appropriate term to use. It is a word widely used in the Hellenistic period for
"criterion," "norm," "standard of excellence," or the like,
and it was used in the early church largely in three phrases: canon of truth (kanon tes
aletheais, regula veritatis), canon of faith (kanon tes pisiteos, regula fidei),
canon of the church (kanon tes ekklesias, regula ecclesiastica). By extension the
term was also used specifically to designate decrees of church councils, church law,
monastic regulations, the central part of the mass, and elevation to sainthood. A secondary
meaning of the word, a "list," was not applied to a group of writings before the
late fourth century and may well have come about because of a technical innovation: the
invention of the codex. "Canon" in this sense is then only an instruction to the
copyist (later printer): when you produce a codex or Bible, copy the items on this list and
in this order. We often say "canon" where we ought to say "Scripture."

One could define the formation of Scripture (or "canon" in modern parlance) as
the deliberate selection and collection of ancient traditions into a new authoritative group
of writings which have a normative function for a community such that any other later
normative writing or speaking must be seen in relation to it. It is clear that that is a
very decisive event in the life of a religious community and one which probably can happen
only once. The formation of Scripture of course establishes "stability," to use
the terminology of James Sanders, but if that were all, the community would soon die of
arteriosclerosis. Canon must also be "adaptable for life,"8
which means being open to midrash,9 to innovative interpretation
in new situations. It is doubtful, however, if a second canon can be added to the first, for
then the new canon becomes the real canon, to which the old must relate itself in order to
establish its legitimacy, reversing the time sequence of Scripture and midrash. At least I
believe that to have been the case in the Christian movement, where the establishment of the
NT as canon went hand in hand with the demotion of the OT Scripture to the subordinate
status.10

Was such a Scripture created in Israel? D.N. Freedman argues that it was.11
According to him, a radically new redaction and reordering of the traditions occurred during
the exile (580-550 B.C.E.) to produce Torah, Former Prophets, and Latter Prophets, as
"public documents, for which the highest religious authority was claimed, promulgated
by an official... group in the Jewish community."12 A
generation or so later (c. 500 B.C.E.), extensive additions were made to the corpus of the
Latter Prophets. Such a baldly stated thesis is of course in need of refinement, which I
think Blenkensopp has provided in his Prophecy and Canon.13 The
Writings, most of which were in existence at the time, were not part of the Scripture, and
when they were later collected and edited, it was in conscious relation to Scripture, a
"canon conscious redaction," as Sheppard calls it, as a kind of midrashic
response.14 They might be called "deutero-canonical"
from a Jewish perspective if "canon" were a Jewish word. In any case, the
existence of Scripture, including at least many of the Writings, can be assumed as
authoritative documents by at least some groups certainly by the beginning of the first
century B.C.E.15 One of the reasons16
for saying this is that if Scripture produces midrash, then conversely midrash presupposes
Scripture, and as Vermes says, "in exegetical writings of the second century B.C. the
main haggadic themes are already fully developed."17 There
was never a church council at Jamnia, and the Rabbis did not seriously debate inclusion or
exclusion.18 But the place of Scripture within Judaism is not
my topic, and I can only refer you to an interesting forthcoming book by Jack Lightstone.

To come now to the formation of the NT canon,19 it seems to
have been shifted from the end of the second to the end of the fourth century, at least
partly because of a new dating of the Muratorian Fragment.20
For the most part it did not involve "canon-conscious redaction," nor did it occur
at a crucial time in the life of the church.21 It is rather a
miscellaneous collection of various occasional writings. Its boundaries have no self-evident
validity, and every criterion mentioned: apostolicity, catholicity, orthodoxy, traditional
usage, has important exceptions both of inclusion and exclusion. In particular, inspiration
was never adduced as a criterion for canonicity in the early church,22
because the Spirit was held to be given to the whole church.23
None of the writings in the NT claims canonical authority for itself (Revelation claims
apocalyptic authority), and most refer specifically to Holy Scripture outside themselves. No
one has ever been able to find a unity in the NT canon24 (as
there is in Freedman's OT Scripture), but instead we have learned to speak of the varieties
of NT religion.25 Since one cannot do NT study today without
speaking of the importance of church tradition (and its continuity with
"post-canonical" tradition), the old Reformation distinction between Scripture and
tradition has lost all historical basis.

It can fairly be said that the Reformation has lost that battle. The separate writings
contained in the NT are all products of tradition, especially the gospels but also the
epistles, being applied in very specific situations.26 Two
phenomena which were of great embarrassment to the early church, the plurality of the
gospels and the particularity of the Pauline epistles, lie at the very heart of contemporary
understanding of these texts. It is true that "The New Testament is the Church's
book"27 not only in that the church created the canon in
the fourth and fifth centuries but also with respect to the composition of the individual
writings in the first and second centuries. Nevertheless, the principle of sola scriptura
remains essential if there is to be any transcendental criterion by which the church can
judge and reform itself. As Barth said, if all we have is tradition, "the church is not
addressed but is engaged in a dialogue with herself."28
Let us see if we can find such a transcendent criterion against which the traditions of the
church can be measured and to ask how it can help in the interpretation of the New Testament
writings.

In response to the theological question of identifying an authority which is not a
product of but transcendent over the church, the answer within a Christian context seems at
first blush to be obvious, Barth's formulation was that Jesus Christ as the first form of
the Word of God has authority over Scripture as the second form of the Word of God which has
authority over the proclaimed word as the third form of the Word of God. If it seems obvious
that Jesus Christ is the canonical principle, it is not at all obvious how one can
understand that statement as anything other than a purely formal principle. We can look at
two classic attempts to put flesh on the principle.

First is the hierarchical concept of the ancient church which says that authority runs:
God - > Christ - > apostles - > bishops - > church. This can be seen, e.g., in I
Clement 42: "The apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus. Jesus Christ
was sent from God. Thus Christ is from God and the apostles are from Christ. In both
instances the orderly procedure proceeds from God's will, ... and the apostles after
preaching in country and city appointed their first converts to be bishops and deacons of
future believers. And this was no novelty,... since Scripture says, 'I will appoint your
bishops in righteousness and your deacons in faith (Isa 60:17)." Or in Justin, I
Apology 39, "The Spirit of prophecy speaks... in this way: 'For out of Zion shall go
forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem...' (etc. Isa 2:3). For from Jerusalem
there went out into the world men, twelve in number and these illiterate, of no ability in
speaking, but by the power of God they proclaimed to every race of men that they were sent
by Christ to teach to all the word of God." Note how both Justin and I Clement base
their argument on Scripture! This theory of apostolic succession was popular in the ancient
church, and its effects are still very much with us today. It is only this theory which
justifies the position of the gospels first in the New Testament and the special liturgical
honour given to the gospels in certain church traditions. The problem is that it is
manifestly untrue! The only apostle to have contributed any writing to the NT, Paul, hardly
ever passes on tradition received from Jesus and even boasts that he never knew him (2 Cor
5:16). It was a nice theory, but here surely theology has no historical or Biblical basis on
which to build whatsoever.

The modern attempt to base revelation on tradition stemming from Jesus has had no greater
success. Again it seems at first quite reasonable to ascribe to the teaching of Jesus
greater authority than the gospels which report it, perhaps even to print his words in red
ink. But it is perhaps significant that the church never thought to preserve the teaching of
Jesus in the language in which he spoke it. Here the Leben Jesu movement flounders on
the phenomenon which already worried the ancient church: the plurality of the gospels. Quite
apart from any modern judgments about the authenticity of individual sayings, the gospels
seen synoptically show that the gospel writers were quite prepared to alter the Jesus
tradition rather freely to address their own particular situations. The teaching of Jesus is
not a given but must be reconstituted. The problem is that no two reconstructions are the
same and they all show evidence of selectivity based on modern religious desires. The quest
for the historical Jesus finally dug its own grave, for the more it tried to recover the
teaching of Jesus the more it became apparent how much that teaching differs from the Jesus
figure liberal theology wanted to find. Here is very shifty sand indeed, and the enterprise
has been quietly dropped in theological circles even if its influence is still very much in
evidence in popular piety.

Before giving up on the attempt to find in the teaching of Jesus the revelatory link
between God and the church, we might speculate on how the situation might have been
different if Jesus had written a book. If such a book emphasized discontinuity we might have
had a new religion and a new Scripture, with little relationship to what went before, as is
the case with the Qur'an. Under such circumstances, but only under such circumstances,
Marcion's proposal might have succeeded. But if, as I believe would have been the case, such
a book emphasized continuity, we would have had no church at all, for those attracted to the
teaching of Jesus would have followed his call to become better Jews. As Gentile Christians
we may well be grateful that in the providence of God Jesus decided not to write a book.

Is there another criterion, a kanon tes aletheias, which stands above the church's
canon, in the sense of a list of authoritative writings? The Lutheran tradition in
particular has been concerned with the question of the canon within the canon. Note how the
word "canon" is being used in two senses, "criterion" and
"list." The same ambiguity has plagued much of the discussion since ancient times.29
Luther's classic statement is: "That is the true test by which to judge all books...
when we see whether or not they promote (treiben) Christ... Whatever does not teach
Christ is not yet apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul does the teaching. Again,
whatever preaches Christ would be apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, and Herod were
doing it."30 Here is a way of putting Christ in the
centre, not as a link in passing revelation through apostolic succession but in terms of
what God has done in Christ's death and resurrection. Here is a criterion above the church's
canon, which effectively relativizes the individual writings under the centre of the gospel.
It is however much more seriously deficient in its subjectivity: if James does not promote
Christ for some, that writing does for others. It is perhaps such considerations which have
led E. Käsemann to propose a more specific and objective canon-within-the-canon or
"material centre" (Sachmitte), namely the justification of the ungodly.
This is perhaps a bit theological and certainly very Paul-centred, but it is also not as
objective as it seems. With equal persuasive force, Stuhlmacher can argue that the centre
ought rather to be "reconciliation."31 While it is
true that every church tradition and many individual Christians have their own
canon-within-the-canon, unconscious or acknowledged, there is no criterion to adjudicate
their rival claims. As Käsemann argued, "the NT canon does not constitute the
foundation of the unity of the church."32 But he can also
give no compelling reason why that unity must be achieved on his terms, and the church
remains in dialogue with itself, with no sola scriptura to address it.33

It seems that we could be on surer footing if we were to appeal not to a modern but to an
ancient regula fidei, not to apostolic succession but to "apostolic"
tradition of the second century. This has the great advantage not only of concentrating on
the Christological centre but of doing so with more essential detail than the abstract
modern examples cited. It is not that I intend to express anything but basic agreement with
the regula fidei, but a number of points must be noted. First, the regula fidei
was not meant to be a compendium of the faith but presupposes the authority of Holy
Scripture for theology and practice. Second, the regula fidei was not derived from a
NT canon, which did not yet exist, but was at least in part a guide to the midrashic
interpretation of Holy Scripture (=OT). Third, the regula fidei was only a part of
the apostolic tradition (regula ecclesiastica), which also included
"apostolic" liturgies and church orders. Fourth, there exists enough diversity in
the "apostolic" tradition that it is quite misleading to speak of the
tradition: there were only traditions and any consensus which developed was a secondary
phenomenon.34 Finally, we are after all speaking of traditions
and not of a criterion (kanon) which transcends the church. Nevertheless, we have heard a
hint of a sola scriptura, a scripture not created by the traditions of the church.

It is possible to push the concept of apostolic tradition into the first century. Many
will agree with the method, though no longer the content, of Bultmann's NT theology. He
begins with the kerygma of the Jerusalem and Hellenistic church (sing!) as primary,
continues with Paul and John as the (only!) great "theologians" and concludes with
a long section on "Development toward the Ancient Church,''

including non-canonical material.35 If the first is naive
and the second too restrictive, our interest is with the final section While Bultmann is
right in seeing the continuity between the "sub-apostolic" writings in the NT and
the early church, he sees it as a decline into "early catholicism." R.E. Brown36
and R.H. Fuller,37 on the other hand, see the movement more
positively and would understand post- apostolic writings not as containing the gospel but as
authoritative indications of how the gospel is to be transmitted to later generations. There
are great advantages in leaving the lower limits of the NT canon quite permeable.

The NT canon is not a unity and cannot serve as a norm. That is true not only of the
individual writings but also of the kerygmata they contain. Scholars as different as
W. Bauer and J.D.G. Dunn agree that the early Christian movement began with a rich diversity
of kerygmata and gospels and Christologies and theologies. That is only to be
expected, since we are dealing after all with church traditions and both the communities
that formulated them and the communities for which they were being adapted. Insofar as there
is unity, it lies in the conviction that God has acted in Jesus Christ and that this God is
the God of Holy Scripture. The significant subtitle of C.H. Dodd's According to the
Scriptures is The Substructure of NT Theology. Scripture is the criterion, the canon, to
which the early Christians appealed, and it is definitely not the creation of the church.
Here, then, we have found our sola scriptura.

The second part of the proposal I think follows inevitably from the first, the anchoring
of the sola scriptura principle firmly in the Holy Scriptures of ancient Israel. The
second thesis is that it is best not to speak of a canon of the New Testament at all but
rather of midrash (J. Sanders) or explicatio (J. Calvin).38
It really does make a difference when one recognizes, along with C.F. Evans, that
"Christianity is unique among world religions in being born with a Bible in its
cradle."39

As the new discipline of canonical criticism points out, the creation of a canon of Holy
Scripture is a decisive step in the life of a community. It lies in the nature of canon to
provide stability. While one can in theory or in practice neglect parts of it or reject the
whole to start a new religion, no new canon can be added to canon once it is created. At the
same time it lies in the nature of canon to he "adaptable for life," and if it is
truly to function as Scripture it cries out for constant reinterpretation in the ongoing
believing communities. A necessary counterpart to canonical criticism is "comparative
midrash," which includes but is more than history of interpretation. If it is true that
once a canon is formed revelation is restricted to the canonical text, it must also be
emphasized that revelation does occur again and again in the believing communities in their
various situations, sometimes with radically new meaning. If the concept of inspiration (and
thus of revelation in a post-canonical situation) is to be meaningful, it must refer not
just to a private transaction in the past but to what God does in the present. Inspiration
occurs whenever a community, in its own particular situation in time and space, within the
continuity of the whole tradition of interpretation is inspired to hear what God says to
them in the words of Holy Scripture. "Every Scripture, whenever (from time to time) it
is inspired by God, is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training..."
(2 Tim 3:16). "Ubi et quando visum est deo," as the Reformers said. As
revelation is more authoritative than an ancient text, so midrash can be more authoritative
for the community than the canon as such. There is a tension between the exegetical meaning
of a text, which can be more or less established historically, and the homiletical, even
inspired meaning, which is true for its time and place but is not authoritative for other
situations in the same way as is the exegetical meaning. The canon remains as sola
scriptura as a control over interpretations which claim to be revelation but are not or
are no longer such.

There were major problems involved when the church thought it had two canons, an Old
Testament and a New Testament.40 The problem is of course much
greater than the names, although they contribute to it. As is well known the word
"Testament" is a famous mistranslation by Tertullian,41
and while "Covenant" might well be appropriate for the first canon, it does not
adequately characterize the second. The real problem, however, lies in the adjectives
"Old" and "New," insofar as they are held, consciously or unconsciously,
to have any meaning at all. Again, I refer to the Babylonian captivity of Hebrew Scripture
under the chains of the concept "Old Testament." The concept "New
Testament" can and almost always has led interpreters of these documents into a
hermeneutic of antithesis. In what follows, we shall look at some of the theological
consequences which accrue from a hermeneutic of continuity, which in turn depends (I think)
on the concept of canonical Scripture and authoritative midrash. If we eliminate the concept
of "New Testament" we shall have to find another name to refer to it. For lack of
anything better, I shall follow the example of Paul van Buren and speak from now on of the
Apostolic Writings.

It is clear that the teaching of Jesus is to be understood completely in Biblical
categories and that none of it is intended to be in antithesis to them. His teaching can in
particular be understood as authoritative midrash of the Scriptural passages proclaiming the
kingdom of God, saying that now they were about to be fulfilled. Jesus' teachings and his
deeds are to be interpreted without remainder as part of the .Judaism of his day, in
continuity with Scripture and the tradition of its post-Biblical interpretation. That means
that by incorporation into Jesus as the one in whom God has acted for their sake Gentiles
have complete access to Jesus' Scripture (and its living interpretations) and to Jesus' God
who speaks in them. The doctrine of the Trinity has logical priority over Christological
doctrines,42 something obscured by too abstract formulations.
What is said is that the "Father" to whom the "Son" relates is none
other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel and
Leah, the God of Moses and Jeremiah and Ezra and Esther. The doctrine of the Trinity
formulates the fact that through the Son and the Holy Spirit this is the God Gentiles
worship too.

Also Christology depends on Scripture, as an interpretation of it and not an addition to
it. The earliest creedal formula in the Apostolic Writings, in its shortest form, states
that "Christ died in accordance with the Scriptures... was raised in accordance with
the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3-5). Even the resurrection is not in itself revelatory but
is an ambiguous event which is in itself mute. No church was ever founded on the basis of
the resurrection of Lazarus or Jairus' daughter or the widow's son or Tabitha or Euthychus,
or on the ascension of Enoch or Elijah or Moses or Mary. What makes Jesus' resurrection
unique and gives it revelatory voice is that it was "according to the Scriptures."
The risen Christ "beginning with Moses and all the prophets interpreted to them in all
the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Lk 24:27). Failure to recognize this
could lead us to misunderstand, even to trivialize, the claims made by the Christology of
the earliest Christians.43

Paul claims that his gospel was "proclaimed beforehand to Abraham" because
"Scripture knew beforehand that God would justify the Gentiles from faithfulness'' (Gal
3:8), that "the Gospel of God concerning his Son was promised earlier through hisof
mphets in Holy Scriptures" (Rom 1:2), and that "the Law and the Prophets testified
to the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ" (Rom 3:21f). It
was expected that Scripture was the criterion for the truth of the gospel: those who
received the word "examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so"
(Acts 17:11). And yet this tends not to be recognized by modern scholars. Vielhauer44
in particular complains that Paul's interpretation of the "Old Testament" is
completely arbitrary and need not be taken seriously. All of this is because of the concepts
of "New Testament" and "Old Testament," and the fact that the former
seems not to relate very well to the latter. But if we begin with the concept of Holy
Scripture, then we need to take seriously its living transmission in the midrash of
subsequent communities. The task of the Pauline interpreter is then not to contrast Paul and
the Old Testament itself but to try to reconstruct something of the history of
interpretation of the text and to locate Paul with respect to these midrashic traditions.
Insofar as this can be done, Paul's own midrash, while creative, is not at all arbitrary and
outlandish. Here is a good example of how a change of concept might enrich exegesis and give
more, not less, authority to the Apostolic Writings.

Understanding the Apostolic Writings as midrash means that there is no sharp line
separating NT and early church. That is of course true historically, but it also has
important theological consequences. We ought not to try to jump from the "letters from
heaven" posted in the first century directly to our own time but (Christians should
recognize that they are only the most recent stage in a process, which began with Easter in
the light of Ezra, of receiving tradition and hearing Scriptural midrash to illuminate their
own present. Even in the fifth century, liturgy and the regula fidei and a living
tradition were much more important than drawing up a list of books. For the first and second
centuries, Cullmann45 argued long ago that the emerging
tradition and the rule of faith (creeds) were more authoritative than the writings which
contain them. This is the truth in what Catholic doctrine has always claimed. There are
important elements of the Christian tradition not contained in the Apostolic Writings and
there are aspects of the Apostolic Writings which have only relative importance as a stage
in the transmission of that tradition. Other aspects of the Apostolic Writings seem to many
to be theologically and ethically problematic - the anti-Judaism of some of them is only one
example - and we now have a criterion transcending both ourselves and the church which gives
theological justification for that conclusion, namely incompatibility with Holy Scripture as
the sola scriptura which stands above the church.

The proposal to abolish the New Testament in favour of Christian traditions and Christian
midrash also has consequences for the work of our Society. I do not seriously propose
renaming it the Canadian Society for the Study of the Hebrew Bible and its Post-biblical
Midrash/La Société Canadiènne pour l'Etude de la Bible Hébraique et son Midrash
Post-biblique. Nevertheless, I hope that many of us adopt this perspective. I refer in
particular to those who study as I do the Apostolic Writings. We are freed from the shackles
of thinking we must try to find antithesis to Scripture where none is intended, but we also
have a serious and difficult obligation. That is to seek to recover the midrashic tradition
that began when Scripture first became Scripture and to situate our interpretation of the
Apostolic Writings within that tradition. This means not only to acknowledge the legitimacy
of other midrashic understandings but also to see that the writings we study subordinate
themselves to the overall authority of Scripture and are to be understood from that
perspective.

We return to Brevard Childs but stand him on his head. The church does indeed need a
canon to act as a transcendent criterion to adjudicate among conflicting church traditions.
We look for that canon, however, not in the collection of certain church writings on the
list but in the authority they themselves appealed to: the Scripture of Israel here is our sola
scriptura.

Notes:

C.F. Evans, Is Holy Scripture Christian? (London: SCM, 1971).
He also says, "It is, after all, obvious that the Christian church was meant to
have a holy scripture in the sense of the Old Testament, which it succeeded in demoting
but which it fatally took as a model" (p.17).

B. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction
(I,ondon: SCM, 1984).

Ibid., 323.

See N.A. Dahl, "The Particularity of the Pauline Epistles as a
Problem in the Ancient Church," Neotestamentica et Patristica (Leiden:
Brill, 1962) 261-271.

See 0. Cullmann, "The Plurality of the Gospels as a Theological
Problem in Antiquity," The Early Church (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956)
39-54.

Childs, 427.

Ibid., 240.

The two terms are J.A. Sanders'. See his Canon and Community: A
Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia.: Fortress, 1981) and From Sacred
Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), or, even
more conveniently, his article on hermeneutics in IDB(S).

As with any currently popular term, the word ''midrash'' is used in
widely different senses. D. Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutics in Palestine
(Missoula: Scholars, 1975), tries to introduce terminological clarity by making
distinctions between a) literary genre, b) hermeneutical methods, and c) hermeneutical
convictions. The first may (or may not) he present in the NT (Heb). The second is found
in important parts of some NT writings, which cannot be understood except as part of a.
long midrashic tradition (i.e., cannot be related directly to an "OT' without doing
violence to both). The third, a midrashic hermeneutic "takes place between the two
poles 'Scripture' and the 'worshipping community'" (p 319) and can be said to
characterize all the NT writings. J. Sanders seems usually to intend this third sense.

See my "Legicide and the Problem of the Christian Old Testament:
A plea for a New Hermeneutic of the Apostolic Writings," Transformations in
Judaism and Christianity after the Holocaust (ed. I. Greenberg, et al.; Bloomington:
Indiana University Press)

D.N. Freedman, "The Law and the Prophets," Supplements
to Vetus Testamentum 9 (l,eiden: Brill, 1962) 250-265

Here I rely to a large extent on the excellent short book by H.Y.
Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1985). Cf. also H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible
(London: Black, 1972).

The crucial period in the life of the church produced not a canon but
a fundamentally new midrash in occasional writings which have been treasured by the
church ever since.

See A.C. Sundberg, Jr., "The Bible Canon and the Christian
Doctrine of Inspiration," Int 29 (1975) 352-371. Very helpful in general is P.
Achtemeier, The Inspiration of Scripture: Problems and Proposals (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1980).

I Clement claims to be inspired by the Holy Spirit as e.g. Romans
does not. We can also note that I Clement had more authority than Romans in most places
in the second century church.

In dealing with the criteria in the early church for inclusion in the
NT canon, "one can only speak of the principle of having no principle," K.
Aland, The Problem of the New Testament Canon (London: Mowbray, 1962).

Of course the same could be said of the separate writings of the OT,
but the point is that they do not contain church tradition.

W. Marxsen, The New Testament as the Church's Book
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972). For growing Protestant recognition of the importance of
tradition see E. Flesseman van Leer, Tradition and Scripture in the Early Church
(Assen Van Gorcum, 1954).

P. Stuhlmacher, "The Gospel of Reconciliation in Christ; Basic
Features and Issues of a Biblical Theology of the New Testament," HBT 1 (1979)
161-190.

E. Käsemann, "The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of
the Church," Essays on New Testament Themes (London: SCM, 1964) 95-107.

There has been much ferment in German Lutheran theological circles,
conveniently collected by E. Käsemann, Dahiteue Testament als Kanon; Dokumentation
und kritische Analyse zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion (ed. E. Käsemann; Göttingcn:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1970), with his own comments, but they are singularly
unhelpful since all the contributors assume that the OT is not really Holy Scripture.

See the fundamentally important work of W. Bauer (note 25).

It is becoming more and more customary to ignore the limitations of
canon in writing "introductions"; cf. e.g. H. Koester, Introduction to the
Nee Testament (2 vols; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

R.H. Fuller, "The Development of the Ministry,"
Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue (Maxi, n.d.) 76-93.

"In speaking of the Scripture Paul means what we call the Old
Testament; how can he say that it makes a man perfect? If that is so, what was added
later through the apostles would seem to be superfluous. My answer is that as far as the
substance of the Scripture is concerned, nothing has been added. The writings of the
apostles contain nothing but a simple and natural explanation of the law and the
prophets along with a clear description of the things expressed in them" Commentary
on 2 Tim 3:17.

C.F. Evans, "The New Testament in the Making," The
Cambridge Historyof the Bible, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970) 232-284

This is not to say that we ought to take the midrashic methods of the
early church as a model of how we ought to read Holy Scripture. But we cannot understand
early Christian writings unless we understand their positive relation to Holy Scripture,
as opposed the perspective of the later canon which demotes Holy Scripture to mere
"Old Testament".

O. Cullmann, "The Tradition," The Early Church
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956) 59-99. Cf. W.G. Kümmel, Introduction to the New
Testament (London: SCM, 1966) 358, "We can recognize what rightly stands in the
canon only on the basis of the apostolic witness contained in the canon."

(First published in Bulletin of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Vol.
47, 1987)